1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the area of data communication. In particular, the present invention relates to method and system for capturing an image of a type of media carrying information that a user is desirous to acquire and updating the information when there is an update.
2. Description of the Related Art
A business card carries not only contact information but also represents an image of business. Exchanging business cards thus becomes a meeting protocol between two people when the two meet for the first time. As such there are approximately 15 billions business cards exchanged hands each year, but about 95% of these cards end up in trash cans. One of the reasons that so many business cards are thrown away is that these business cards are hard to manage and impossible to update.
In fact, as time goes by, many people end up with a lot of collected business cards from numerous occasions. However, managing these paper-based or banner-like physical business cards is indeed not an easy task. Habitually, many people just add collected business cards on a pile, sometimes the pile becomes so high or so big that the bottom part of the pile has to be thrown away, unknowingly throwing away important contact information that may be useful from time to time.
There are paper versions of business card organizers with a few pages, each of the pages including an array of plastic transparent pouches that allow users to insert one business card in each of the plastic pouches. A business card organizer provides a way similar to a book for a user to look for a particular card. However, soon after a business card organizer makes it difficult to organize received business cards. Whenever a new card is received, those cards already inserted in the plastic pouches would have to be shifted if the user desires to keep all the cards in an order. In reality, newly received cards are often stacked on other cards that are already in the plastic pouches, resulting in a disorganized business card organizer with many of them being obsolete over times. Worse, a user has no way to decide which ones shall be discarded.
An advanced way to manage collected business cards is to use business card scanners. Like sheet-fed scanners, a business card scanner is a smaller version, particularly designed to scan business cards. Typically, a software package is installed in a host computing device (e.g., a PC or PDA). The software package may include a driver for scanning/receiving image, an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine and an electronic business card organizer. When a card is scanned, the image of the card is transported from the scanner by a cable (e.g., a USB cable) to the host computing device executing the software, to extract data from the image by the OCR engine and to enter the extracted data into what is commonly called an electronic address book. As more business cards are scanned in, the electronic address book is gradually populated. The electronic address book may provide a sorting function and/or a searching function for a user to quickly locate contact information of a particular person being sought. Compared to the number of people that need to manage their business cards, however, only a limited number of users are using business card scanners to manage their business cards electronically.
It has been observed that it takes some time (e.g., 10˜20 seconds) to scan a card, process an image of the card, and recognize the characters in the image, often with some errors. A user sometimes has to correct the errors before the data is saved in the electronic address book. Further the electronic address book is only locally accessed unless the user transports the electronic address book to a portable device. Nevertheless, the majority of the electronic address book quickly becomes obsolete when persons (a.k.a., givers) of the business cards have changed their jobs, phone numbers or email addresses.
Some portable devices introduced recently include a camera and a software module. A user can take a snapshot of a business card using the camera. The image of the card is then processed in a portable device. Being a portable device and of low cost, the computing power (horsepower) in the portable device is often very limited. As a result, it takes a longer time to process such an image in the portable device. Moreover, should a portable device be lost, the user may have lost his/her entire electronic address book. Likewise, the majority of the address book becomes obsolete over time.
There is thus a great need for mechanisms that help professionals, business people and others manage their received business cards more efficiently and keep their address books updated all the times.